Charming Monsters

Today is Day Zero of San Diego Comic Con – the last day of set-up and the first night of exhibiting, with a short but stressful preview night cracking the seal on the exhibit hall at 6 pm (or probably earlier, if past years are any indication). It’s actually been a relaxing run-up to the show, which has us all a little paranoid that something terrible is waiting in the wings. Hopefully those fears will be proven wrong!

Otakon was an awesome show – lots of fun, lots of in-jokes, lots of great fans. Any show where our biggest problem is selling out of product early doesn’t really merit much complaint! The fault there was our own: inventory planning for cons is always a tricky guessing game. Too little product, and you wind up with limited sales and disappointed fans; too much, and you have to cover expensive shipping for the remainders.

Anyway, gotta run – hauling boxes over to the con floor now for our final set-up run. Online time’s going to be limited, as we’ve got four people sharing one computer/internet connection here, but I’ll do my best!

Also: I have tickets for the Amanda Palmer CBLDF concert, AND an awesome date for the show. Huzzah!

Settling into Baltimore for the first stage of our 12-day, two-con tour. The city is lovely but steamy, so humid-hot that even my lizard self is balking at the baked sidewalks. Our flights went well and the Holiday Inn hotel staff has been great so far about putting up with our lunacy (we shipped about two dozen boxes of product to the hotel earlier this week, which became an epic quest to locate this afternoon). Right now it’s Omar Dogan, Jim, Hiyashi (our Japanese translator) and myself; Chamba‘s joining us late tonight, and Jo Chen arrives on Saturday morning to complete the booth set-up.

BUT the best part of the day was waiting for us when we logged into email on the hotel’s free wifi – DARKSTALKERS TRIBUTE hit number one on Amazon Japan’s foreign language book list. Not just comics or art books, BOOKS. All of them. For several glorious hours, we were beating out Michael Jackson and Twilight for the top sales slot. Jim’s got a screenshot of our moment of triumph (and yes, it hurts so much that they don’t have the cover image up yet!).

Heady stuff. It may just be a fluke of some kind, a glut of sales timed just so to bounce us to the top of the charts, but it did the trick of getting everybody pumped for the con rush.

Even with hotel wifi, I’m not sure how regular my blogging will be; nine hours in the exhibit hall, plus set-up, tear-down and all the socializing away from the dealer hall are an exhausting combo.

Another seven days in my government contract to go, which means I continue to be swamped, but I had to come up for air to announce a couple of very cool things:

The Shuster Award nominees for 2009 were announced this morning, and UDON Entertainment is up for Best Publisher! Of course, we’re up against Drawn & Quarterly, who’ve won the category in all but one previous year, but a girl can dream, can’t she? I think the last year has been UDON’s best for publishing so far, what with the original Street Fighter books (shipping consistantly on time & with great art, thanks to Matt’s awesome stewardship), the manwha and upcoming Manga For Kids lines, and the art books (Darkstalkers Tribute is going to knock people’s socks off!). Guess we’ll see on June 27th!

A couple of my friends are also up for awards: Cameron Stewart in the webcomics category for Sin Titulo, while Ray Fawkes & Cecil Castellucci are among the contenders for Best Writer. Woo!

Legends of Zork, the online browser game Jim did artwork for, launched yesterday. He’s started an art blog at http://www.jimzub.blogspot.com/ and will be posting images every day or so over the next month.

AND flights are booked for the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, April 25-26! This is one of my favorite shows and the guest list this year is absolutely stellar. Can’t wait!

YA Author John Green is not a pornographer.

UK citizen Cat Le-Huy (Diz) is not a drug smuggler.
(please sign the petition!)

Cecil Castellucci is, however, pretty darned awesome.

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General update: Mostly, I’m writing. The first draft of Familiar Tricks, which wants to be a much longer book than I’d anticipated, is about 2/3rds complete, and I’ve just finished an edit of Bearers of Bad Tidings, which has been sent to a few brave souls for their review. I’m feeling a bit nervous about that.

Vegas was entertaining. It deserves an entry of its own, but there’s no telling when I’ll have time for blog catch-up. Short version: it’s both liberating and confusing to be in a place which encourages gawking, photo-taking, meandering tourist behaviour.

Affairs with my accountant are finally settled! My files are safely back in my possession and everything seems to be in order. Insomnia reduction: 14%.

Yesterday, I shoveled this sidewalk in this outfit. Platform boots get surprisingly good traction in fresh snow.